Someone In My Head
by Ayien
Summary: Vincent died a long, long time ago, somewhere in the labs beneath that hollow mansion in Nibelheim, and left Cid holding only the shattered pieces of the man he would have loved, if he had ever truly known him.


**A/N:** This was done for the Livejournal community 'Springkink', on the prompt 'Cid/Vincent: MPD(or DID) and PTSD - Vincent is working through it, Cid helps.'

* * *

_Everyone in AVALANCHE knows there's something wrong with Vincent- and not something easily repaired, like faulty wiring or a loose screw. It's something deeper- like someone took Vincent's brain and shook it all around so all the pieces got jumbled up and broken and sharp-edged, and there isn't any way any of them can be put back together the way they once were._

_Cid knows it most._

_He's the one trying to fix him._

* * *

'Rrrrip.'

Cid opens his eyes, blinks in weary confusion at the ceiling fan revolving like a slow propeller above him, the clatter-hum of the broken AC the only noise.

'Rrrrip.'

What the hell? The sound reminds him, for a single, terrible second of pink cloth parting before a sword. Cloth tears again, and Cid finally remembers. Something kind of like grief, mixed with anger, muted by futility, boils in his stomach as he rolls onto his side, throws his flannel sheets off, and fumbles with the nightstand drawer, searching for a cigarette and lighter.

Finding one, he lights up, inhaling. He glares down at his shaking hands, the black grease crusted under his fingernails like dried blood.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, you've dealt with a power-hungry albino who wanted to take over the planet, you can deal with this!"

Except Sephiroth was something simple: go in, armed with spear and spells, and kill him.

These horrors in Vincent's head can't be fixed with spears or spells or death. Vincent himself isn't simple- even though back in the quest to kill Sephiroth all Vincent wanted to do was kill himself.

A Vincent trying to live is somehow even harder to deal with than a Vincent trying to die.

The floor is cold beneath his bare feet as he lurches upright, stumbles down the hallway.

Cloth tears faster and faster as he gets closer to the second bedroom, to where he can see Vincent's shadow- curled into a ball of blackness like the silhouette of an abandoned child- on the wall. Vincent's legs are sticking out from behind the back of the couch, and he knows-

It's not the shard of Vincent that he knows in that body right now, because his shard would never be so stupid to try and hide behind a fucking _couch_. Cloth tears and rends and shreds like the sounds of guts spilling over his hands back in the Wutai War.

"Hey."

Pause in the rips. Cid swallows smoke and tears, leans against the wall and inches his way down to end up sitting on the floor, freezing his balls off with his knees pulled to his chest, cigarette a glowing red ember in the darkness.

He leans to the side, searching the gloom. Vincent- Ferren, this shard likes to be called- is slouched against the dusty baseboard, his tattered sleeve dripping with red from sliced skin. Blood pools around Ferren's thighs, stains the floor, and Cid can't see Ferren's eyes, but knows there are no tears in them.

Ash dribbles onto his upturned palm, the burn barely noticed. His mouth is dry and sweat runs cold as ice down his spine.

"Ferren?"

Ferren shifts. More blood pools, and Cid closes his eyes and bites off the end of his cigarette, hammers pounding at the inside of his head.

"Ferren, where's Vincent?"

He doesn't know if he should be thankful that Ferren knows exactly what he is- that he's fully conscious of his existence being only a piece of a shattered being, existing only to hold all the memories that Vincent can't deal with.

Ferren turns, and he sees red eyes glint through the curtain of black like a reflection on metal.

"He's screaming." The sound of skin parting lingers in the air between them, and Cid's hands jerk through a spasm, the urge to help dying unborn. "Did you know that there are seventeen ways to carve open a hand without the victim losing consciousness?"

Cid swallows. He doesn't know, doesn't want to know, but he knows that Hojo knew and probably used every one of those seventeen ways on Vincent, until Vincent couldn't hack it and gave all the memories to Ferren.

"Would you like me to demonstrate?" Ferren, smiling like a fucking maniac, opens a long cut over the back of his hand, and Cid squeezes his eyes shut-

"Fucking stop it, you little _bastard_!"

-and lunges, grabs Vincent's good hand, his grip slipping on the bloody fingers. Ferren's head bangs against the wall, but he doesn't make a sound of pain. Cid figures he's probably gone through so much worse that this doesn't even register.

"Go away-" his voice is as harsh as an un-oiled engine's scream, "-and bring Vincent back so I can fix what you did to him!"

Ferren molds himself against him, a broken and bitter child in Vincent's skin, freezing and all limbs and sorrow.

"He doesn't want to come back," Ferren whispers into the side of Cid's neck, a pathetic parody of a kiss, "Can't you hear him screaming?"

Cid spits a curse and hauls Ferren upright, the shard unresisting, slings his arm over his shoulders and drags him down the hallway, the smoke doing nothing to help the bitter agony roiling in him.

Ferren collapses on the dirty bathroom tile like a puppet with its strings cut, head lolling against the wall, half-closed eyes faintly mocking, his bleeding wrist resting on his crazily tangled legs. He looks like a junkie, like all the little boys- the crazy little flyboys Cid was supposed to protect, the crazy little flyboys whose personal effects he'd boxed up and sent home to their mamas, burnt dog tags in the boxes- Cid knew in the Wutai War that ended up curled on the floor of some dive bar, searching for solace from the horrors in their heads.

The medicine bottles clatter to the floor as he wrenches the first-aid kit out, pulls out a roll of bandages, bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

Ferren watches as he kneels, swabs the blood away. His hands move into a familiar rhythm, born of hundreds of nights wrapping self-mutilated skin. And even though all those wounds heal within an hour without a scar, Cid does this anyway- wastes bandages and peroxide- because no one did this for Vincent back then, in the horrible lab that created Ferren.

And even though doing it now won't help-

It's something.

The cigarette is burnt down to the filter. Moonlight lights the tiny bathroom, and Cid glances at the mirror, stops at the sight.

A beam of moonlight shining through the window, piercing his back, stopping before it can hit Vincent. But then- he smirks- that's his job, now: protecting Vincent. He turns back, and watches as blood seeps through the bandages in black stains.

Cid brushes a rough thumb across them. Ferren watches, heavy-lidded, and bows his head as Cid whispers,

"I wish you wouldn't do this to yourself."

He doesn't know who he's speaking to- Vincent, Ferren, himself for getting so tangled up in this?

"So does he," Ferren says.

There is a long silence in the bathroom.

Cid sighs, shoves himself to his feet, takes Ferren's hand and pulls him upright. It's late, and he doesn't have the heart to argue Ferren into letting Vincent come back.

And isn't that a fucking hoot, that he calls his shard 'Vincent', even though every single one of Vincent's three shards _is_ Vincent, or a part of him? Hell, he might as well call his shard 'Vincent 2.0' or some shit. There used to be five shards, but Vincent integrated two of them- the books say that's progress.

They trudge down the hallway and into Cid's bedroom- he gave Vincent Shera's old bedroom, because everybody should have their own space, and just because they're lovers doesn't change that- where Ferren lets Cid throw a shirt at him.

Cid flops into bed, holds the sheet up for Ferren to slide in beside him before pulling it up over them. Ferren rolls over, curls into his side, bandaged arm thrown over his chest, lips moving against his shoulder.

Ferren clings to him and whispers a litany of hell against his skin. Cid knows every single word of pain- knows acid, scalpels, poisons- and feels bruised and battered and bloodied by it, a receptacle for every agonizing memory that Vincent broke himself apart to escape. Cid knows all that Vincent has forgotten.

He knows all that he has to ask Vincent to remember.

* * *

There are good days, and there are bad days. Today's a good day.

Vincent's up before Cid- as usual- and is sitting in the kitchen with his back in the corner, ready for any attack. It's a ridiculous sight- a rail-thin man in dark pants worn gray at the knees, Death Penalty close to his hand, a cup of black coffee at his side. There's not going to be any attack, but Cid doesn't say anything as he stirs his tea.

"I switched last night, didn't I?"

Cid doesn't look up from the morning newspaper, too engrossed in the article on Shinra's deliberations over restarting the space program.

"Yep."

"Which one?"

Cid folds the newspaper, tosses it aside, and puts his boots up on the table, leaning back in his chair.

"Ferren- he was ramblin' about the seventeen ways of cutting open someone's hand without them fainting."

Something flickers in Vincent's eyes, pained and ancient. He glances down at his claw, sighs, loud in the quiet of the kitchen. The light of dawn slants through the screen door in a square of pale butter on the floor.

Cid watches Vincent watch the light, hungering for something lost for thirty years. Something he still doesn't have- because Vincent's still stuck in that coffin with four demons and three shards- should probably call them 'alters' like all the psych books Shera shoved on him do, but alters is too clinical, too mechanical, and if there's one thing Cid's learned through this whole damn thing is that the human mind, no matter how much he wishes and dreams and hopes, isn't a machine, and he can't fix it like one- below Nibelheim.

Vincent shakes himself out of his reverie and stands, holstering Death Penalty. "We're delivering a load of supplies to the Icicle Inn today."

"We are?" Cid blinks, rubs at his eyes with the back of his wrist. "I must've forgotten; it's been so fucking busy 'round here lately."

Vincent is still as stone, but he can see a new block of guilt settling on shoulders too skinny to hold much more.

"Now you can just stop that shit right there!" Cid barks, standing up from his chair with a clatter. The sound is loud, rings like a gunshot. Vincent's hand drops to the Death Penalty, curls around it. Cid sees his eyes squeeze shut, shoulders tensing as the golden claws grate against each other, a high-pitched screech like a dying beast.

This happens. Cid'll do something, or say something, or a noise will be too loud, and all of a sudden Vincent will be just… _gone_.

"Vince," he steps closer, booted feet clunking on tile, and watches Vincent's fingers curl tighter, white knuckles going even paler against the black of the metal. Cid's not the type to harbor illusions- that died in the Wutai War along with thousands of other things- and he knows that Vincent will shoot him when he's gone. But he has to believe that he won't; trusts that he won't.

Trusts that this profoundly fucked-up man isn't that fucked-up; not yet.

He reaches out, touches Vincent's shoulder, feels scar tissue press against his calluses. Vincent is shaking beneath his hand. Cid steps closer, reaches for the gun. Vincent flinches, eyes screwing tighter closed, something- a curse or a name- escaping from between teeth clenched so tightly that it's a wonder they don't break. Tendons stand out like taut ropes in his neck as he lets Cid uncurl his fingers, lets Cid slide the gun from his grip, lets Cid slip up at his back and finally hold him.

Cid waits. And he's not a patient man- never has been, never will be- but he tamps his irritation down, and just waits, resting his hands on Vincent's stomach, over the white craters in his stomach that killed him the first time.

His spine loosens first, but Cid doesn't let go- knows from bitter experience that the first signs don't mean that Vince's going to come back all the way. Then his fingers uncurl, his jaw unclenches, and he relaxes, muscles unwinding.

"You okay?"

He feels Vincent sigh, tightens his grip. Vincent's good hand comes back, wraps around his bicep like he's a drowning man in a storm.

"Just a flashback."

"Yeah?" Cid isn't sure if he wants to know- Vincent's flashbacks aren't as bad as the memories of torture Ferren has, or the memories of the worst assassinations the Turk has, or the memories of the times Hojo forced the beasts in Vincent to come out and kill innocent people that Caen has.

"An assassination. We killed a man who had hacked Shinra's database." Vincent swallows. "His son walked in on us as we left. He was supposed to have been away at boarding school." A hoarse, hollow laugh. "The school had sent him home with measles." Cid feels Vincent flinch underneath his cheek. "I shot him through the eye and burned him and his father to nothing in the back garden before leaving. Textbook. Perfect."

Cid doesn't say anything. Apologies aren't going to do anything, not this late.

All they can do is keep moving on.

* * *

The drop goes perfect. Textbook, like Vincent said.

All in all, it's been a great day-

Until Cid wakes in the middle of the night to find Vincent's gun pressed to his temple and the Turk leering at him from the darkness.

He stays very still.

"What is it?" he says with a mouth dry as the desert. And the books all said it'd get worse before it got better, but he's starting to think none of those bearded old doctors had any goddamn _inkling_ just how much 'worse' could mean.

"You were attacking me." The smile is horrific on Vincent's face as the cold circle presses closer against his skin. "Threats must be neutralized."

When Cid first met Vincent, down in the shadows of the basement, he was intimidated by the effortless aura of 'don't touch me, don't talk to me, don't even _breathe_ near me or I will rip your throat out and feed it to you' that Vincent put off as a matter of course.

But when it comes to the Turk-

He's not intimidated.

He's fucking _terrified_.

Cid's heart is going a mile a minute, and if he's going to have a heart attack then it'd better get here quick, because the Turk seems liable to finish the job before it can.

"I was just sleeping, and if I kicked you or something then I'm really sorry, but can you get off me?"

He wishes he didn't have such a big mouth.

The Turk stares. "You were _attacking_ me. You had your arm around my _neck_."

Cid rolls his eyes to the side- oh, good, the safety's on, but the Turk's thumb is resting on it in threat- and swallows. He doesn't want to die like this, in his cramped bunk in his square metal room with something terrible inside his lover's body to do the killing.

"If you're going to kill me, Vince's going to get really upset," he gambles. The Turk doesn't know who Vincent is. The Turk thinks that Vincent's body is his own. The Turk doesn't care about Vincent.

The safety clicks off.

Cid closes his eyes and wishes for a smoke or a toilet- either will do-

The pain never comes.

"Cid? I switched-"

Cid opens his eyes and watches Vincent's red ones glue themselves to where the barrel of the Death Penalty is welded to his forehead.

The circle of ice leaves his skin in one smooth motion as Vincent pulls the gun away, flicks the safety on, and moving as clockwork as any machine in the world, removes every single bullet and cuts them apart.

"Vince?"

"I'm sorry." Vincent is all sharp edges in the darkness where he is seated at the desk. "I didn't-"

"Hey," Cid says, swinging his feet out of the bed and onto the floor, "I lived, didn't I?" He doesn't say it's okay, because it's not. The airship hums beneath his feet, a sound as comforting as his heartbeat, as he crosses the cabin. Vincent is staring down at the pathetic little piles of gunpowder and metal, silent.

Cid puts his hands on Vincent's shoulders, leans his chin against the top of Vincent's head.

"I hate this," Vincent says, and his claws gouge long scars into the desk. "I hate going to sleep and waking up somewhere completely different. I hate going to do something and coming back to myself two hours later with no idea what I've done during those hours. I hate knowing that I'm not whole- that I'm missing parts of myself."

Cid roots in the pocket of his pants, thrown across the back of the chair, for cigarettes. He lights Vincent one, lights himself one, hands Vincent's to him. Vincent takes it with a murmur of thanks, holds it in his fingers as he says, quiet as the sky,

"Most of all, I hate knowing that whatever memories the alters have are even worse than the ones I have now. I hate knowing that I've got to remember every single one of them for me to ever be normal." He crushes the end of the cigarette in a twitch of violence, leans back into Cid's chest.

"I hate knowing that I hurt you."

Cid says nothing. There is nothing to say.

The books say things will get worse before they get better.

He hopes 'better' comes soon.

* * *

It's night, and Vincent's off on a walk. He likes to range out into the wilderness around Rocket Town for hours- Cid figures it's probably a leftover from when Vincent was a kid. He's said that he used to go on hikes a lot; liked to study animals; liked to collect plants.

Cid's never understood the whole 'life sciences' angle; give him math and physics, and he's happy-

But if tramping around in the mud makes Vincent feel better, then he's all for it.

Shera's standing at the stove, making tea while Cid cleans the Venus Gospel and stares out the window at the stars, his bones heavy with leaden tiredness. He wonders if Vincent's switching; wonders if Chaos or Galian Beast have taken over; wonders if Vincent's looking at the same sky.

"Damn!" he jerks as Shera plops a cup of tea in front of him without warning, Shera sitting in the chair across from him, glaring over the rims of her glasses.

"Spill."

"Spill what?" He plays dumb, knows it's not going to work. The bloody woman knows him too well for that.

"You've been moping; you haven't snapped at me; you've got circles the size of your ego underneath your eyes- _something_ is up, and you're going to tell me."

What the hell? Shera probably knows more than anybody except Cid about Vincent's various psychoses: for fuck's sake, she's the one who gave him all the books.

She knows him better than he knows himself. She knows just how weak he can be.

"Some days I don't think I can do it," he confesses, his hands- arthritis already creeping across his bones- clenched around his cup. "Some days, he'll smile, and he'll only flashback once or twice, maybe even not at all, and then there'll be three days with screamin' and cuttin' and nightmares and constant switching back and forth and-" he feels the cup creak under his white-knuckled grip.

"I _love_ the stupid bastard!" He scrubs at his eyes with the back of a grease-stained hand. "I do- but sometimes when Ferren sits there cutting himself and asking me if I know how much pressure a human aorta can take before it tears, or how many cuts it takes before his body can't keep up- and he knows all this shit, too, 'cause Hojo burned it into him- or I wake up and the Turk's got a gun pointed at my head like he did last night, because I rolled on top of Vince and made him think I was attacking him-"

His voice is the most hopeless it has ever been. "I wonder if I can help him at all. If I can do a goddamn thing for him, or if I just have to sit here and watch him slip through my fingers."

"You can." She reaches out and lays her hand over his, and he- as slow as Vincent's heartbeat- turns his hand over within her grasp, curls callused fingers around hers.

"You can, because you love him."

* * *

Caen disturbs Cid. Caen's not a dangerous psychotic like the Turk, or a self-mutilating psychotic like Ferren: Caen's just a kid, disturbed and broken down by all the things that Hojo made Vincent do. Caen disturbs Cid, because he always wonders what Vincent lost in those labs, to make him think that taking everything in his mind that could be called 'childish' or 'young' to bundle into a shard of raw nerves to hold all the bloody memories of forced murder was a good idea.

He finds Caen huddled in the bathtub, his shirt untucked, his shoes untied, and every single little thing in the world an abrasive knife to Caen's mind.

Caen is sobbing- all the tears that Vincent will never cry- and he is holding his arms before his face like he's warding off blows that stopped coming thirty-odd long years ago. And for fuck's sake, Caen needs to get out of the shower so Cid can take one, because he's covered in engine grease and bits of metal and he's hot and stinking like a dead Marlboro at high noon-

And isn't it funny, that that while Vincent's sitting here in his bathtub, lost so far inside himself that he'll never hear a word Cid says, this has all become so normal that Cid's just concerned about taking a shower?

Isn't that so fucking goddamn _funny_?

Something rips and tears in Cid's throat, and he steps over the lip of the tub and slides to his knees on the porcelain. He grabs Caen and holds onto him like a drowning man, because while Vincent's drowning in his psychoses, Cid's drowning right along with him, and if Vincent's going to go down then they'll bloody well go down together.

Caen's tears are unnaturally hot on his skin, burning him in more ways than one. He holds him and feels Caen shake and listens to Caen's bubbling whispers of "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I never meant to-

_Please_ don't die."

But that unknown person that died at Hojo's hands manifested in the form of a beast is dead, and they're never coming back. And Caen shakes and sobs against him while Cid holds grimly on- because while he didn't sign up to fix a scarred and broken mind when he fell in love with Vincent, he'll be damned if he's not going to try- and wonders what Vincent was like as a kid, a real kid, before he got old and got jaded and got killed and got tortured.

Because Cid's never known Vincent, not really. He's never known him as a whole person: he's never known him with the Turk's black humor, or Caen's interest in all things new, or Ferren's affection.

Because Vincent's dead.

Vincent died a long, long time ago, somewhere in the labs beneath that hollow mansion in Nibelheim, and left Cid holding only the shattered pieces of the man he would have loved, if he had ever truly known him.

* * *

'Better' finally comes.

Cid's been writing down all the memories Ferren has given him in his indecipherable chicken-scratch scrawl, letters jagged with fury and pity. They fill a whole notebook, one of those old college-ruled ones with the spirals that always get bent- Cid had lots of them when he was still in the Air Force, full of math problems and crazy designs and all the bits and pieces of imagination that would find reality as the _Highwind_. But this notebook doesn't have anything in it of creation: only of destruction. The pages are spattered with ashes, a few with tears, the blue ink running in spots.

This notebook isn't his, for all he's filled it with rage and love.

It's Vincent's.

Cid's stomach is curled around itself like a knotted hose as he pulls the notebook out of his jacket pocket and hands it to Vincent, who's spread like a cat over the rest of the couch, his dark head on Cid's shoulder.

Vincent's eyes flick down to the book. He doesn't look surprised.

"He-" Cid coughs, fumbles, tries again, "Here." He knows what's going to happen. Because Vincent's going to read it, and then all the memories he tore himself apart to get away from will all come crashing back in a hurricane of torture, and then Vincent'll go batshit and lock himself in his room for a week while he tries to sort them out, leaving Cid to stand outside the door and yell profanity at it because Vincent's a stubborn bastard who won't let him _help_.

It's just like the last two times Vincent absorbed a shard.

Vincent gazes at the innocuous blue cover with eyes full of nothing. He lifts his claw in contemplation, his face so calm that it's frightening, because Cid can tell that right now there is nothing more in the world that Vincent wants than to shred the notebook to pieces and pretend it never existed.

But he doesn't, because Vincent's never been a coward.

The notebook leaves his hands, and Vincent sets it on the coffee-table scarred with cigarette burns and coffee rings before leaning back into Cid.

His voice is utterly toneless, "I'll read it after the movie."

Cid doesn't say anything- _because he hates the thought of destroying this fragile little hour of peace_- and curls his arm around Vincent's shoulders, watching the light of the television screen flicker in Vincent's Mako-red eyes like souls in a river of blood.

The pale smoke of his cigarette curls and disappears in the air.

The movie ends, and Cid watches Vincent disappear up the stairs, a notebook full of horror clutched in one bone-white fist.

"Don't try and comprehend it all at once," he yells after him. "Your feeble little brain might not be able to take it!"

"Your concern is noted," Vincent replies, unspoken words lingering after.

'_Thank you_.'

Cid lets his head loll back against the couch and blows out a ring of smoke, his eyelids heavy with lead, his bones aching. He wants to help- wants it so badly he can _taste_ it, bitter and salty- doesn't want to leave Vincent sitting alone in an empty room surrounded by the ghosts of nights in Hojo's 'care'.

But this is Vincent's thing. Those are Vincent's memories, and it's Vincent's brain. Vincent's the one working through it; Vincent's the one who's got to live with it for the rest of his life, which, if Cid's honest with himself, is probably going to last forever.

Cid can't fix him. He can help and he can love and he can be something stable, something solid, for a person who hasn't had solidity or stability for so many long, long years, but he can't fix him.

Vincent's got to fix himself.

The television chatters on and on and Cid watches it with blurry eyes, the room illuminated in ghostly blue-white light. He doesn't know or care what the newspeople are babbling about; it's just something to distract himself from what he knows Vincent is reading right now.

Cattle prods and waterboarding and Mako injections and vivisections parade through his brain in a festival of terror as bile rises in the back of his throat, threatening to spill over into a fit of profanity and tears and vomit. He grabs for the bottle of beer on the side table, the cold biting into his fingers, and he gulps it down, bitter and pointless.

Something rattles from upstairs. Cid rests the cold brown glass of the beer bottle against his forehead, trying to fix his headache, before he sets it down with a thump and gets up, his back creaking, to climb the stairs.

"He'd better not have locked me out, or I _swear_ this time I'll call the fucking locksmith and have him bust the door down!"

The carpet at the top of the landing is harsh on his feet. Vincent's door is open, and moonlight streams through it and hits the opposite wall like a ghost. There is no shadow of Vincent on the wall.

Cid swallows. The hairs on his neck and arms prickle, stand up like someone's passed a generator over his skin. His mouth's as dry as desert, a thin metallic taste slithering across his tongue as he steps forward, leans around the doorframe.

"Vince?"

The window's open, and Vincent is gone.

Cid stands and stares at the curtains fluttering in the breeze, wishing more than anything else that Vincent never had to meet Hojo or Lucrecia, that he never joined the Turks, that…

But Cid's a logical man, and wishes don't do a damn thing. He stumbles over to the window and stares out across the plain, silver and ephemeral in the moonlight. Vincent's somewhere out there with a head full of pain and a body that's going to outlive every damn thing on this planet- and Cid knows it, because he's seen Vincent take a damn bullet to the head, watched bone push out the bullet and skin knit itself back together- and who the hell knows what he's doing, out there all alone in the darkness?

Cid forces back the tears that don't have a place in him anymore, turns, and goes down the stairs to make some phone calls.

Shera- good old dependable Shera- is over in fifteen minutes, a whirlwind of hustle and bustle, heating a pot of soup, finding the phone numbers, taking his beer away from him- he curses her out for that, but she doesn't care-

The others in AVALANCHE offer to come over- even Barrett, who's busy with his own town, and Nanaki, still occupied in rebuilding his species and Cosmo Canyon- but Cid refuses. There's nobody in the world can find Vincent if he doesn't want to be found.

And he knows Vincent's going to come back sooner or later- after all, Vincent's said, Cid's house's the only place that he feels safe.

Time passes. Cid stops shaving, first, a beard spattered with patches of silver that he squints and growls at in the mirror sprouting on his chin. Then he stops getting dressed, wrenching on his machines in a pair of stained sweatpants and a T-shirt. Circles form under his eyes- sleep comes late, or not at all. He stops talking, stops brushing his teeth, stops eating- except the food Shera shoves down his gullet- stops doing anything but banging on engines.

His vision goes blurry around the edges. His stomach growls in pain for a while, but even that fades. His bones ache. His eyes burn. His muscles cramp. His heart hurts.

Because he failed all those boys back in the War- failed them and watched their guts spill out in thick red ropes over his hands when the Wutaians chewed a hole through the back of his plane with bullets, killing his navigator and radar op; failed them when he listened to them screaming at night, haunted by the ghosts of friends that died; failed them when he watched them being loaded into transports home, to be buried in the darkness of the earth for all time- and now Vincent's out there in the night, alone.

Cid should be with him.

Cid should always be with him.

* * *

There's the sound of claws scratching at the back door. Cid drops his wrench on the floor with a loud clang, but he doesn't give a damn, stumbling over a wadded-up paper plate and falling flat on his face in his quest to reach the door. He stands, braces himself on the wall with an arm shaking from exhaustion, hauls open a door that weighs no more than twenty pounds with the greatest of efforts.

Vincent stands framed in the doorway, blood splashed across his face and torn clothes, brambles in his hair and his eyes bruised with lingering horror. His face is hollow, his hair wild, and he stares at Cid with eyes that have seen twenty lifetime's worth of horror.

The bottom drops out of Cid's stomach; something stinging and wet wells in his eyes; his legs shake and act like they're going to fall out from under him like wet noodles. He makes a sound halfway between a strangled laugh and sob as he grabs Vincent, feels ribs press against his chest as he pulls him close in a crushing hug.

"You look like shit," Cid mutters against scars on skin that won't ever heal. Vincent's heartbeat, as slow as the beating of a war drum, thrums against the side of his bearded cheek. Vincent's hand curls around the back of his neck, cold and clammy with blood and sweat. A dry noise- not a laugh, not a sob- rends the air, but there are no tears.

Cid doesn't expect any.

"So do you." A long pause, filled with all the words Vincent will never say. Cid feels him press a kiss into his hair, run a careful hand across Cid's new beard, cataloging the changes, red eyes tired. Cid steps away, leans against the couch.

"Which one of the bastards, this time around?"

Vincent closes the door behind him, reaches up to push his hair out of his eyes, his hair greasy and limp. The mud-spattered sleeve falls, exposes row upon row of wounds too neat to have been done by any of nature's beasts. Neat and clean, just as if they've been cut with five razor blades.

Something hard and wet and painful swells and lodges in Cid's throat.

"It was Ferren," Vincent says as he stares at his arm with nothing in his eyes, hollow face twisting. "The memories came back." His lips curve jaggedly in something resembling a smile, shoulders lifting in the smallest of shrugs. "There was…" his arm drops, sleeve covering the gashes.

"A lot worse," Vincent says in a voice all the more terrifying for its lack of caring, "than I remembered."

Whatever is stuck in Cid's throat _still_ won't go away.

* * *

More time passes.

Cid slouches down the stairs, yawning and scratching at his chest, and stumbles through the kitchen to grope through the cabinets searching for his coffee mug.

"Fucking four o' clock in the bloody morning…"

He finds it, fills it, and turns to flop down in his chair, watching Vincent read the newspaper impatiently.

Vincent passes him the sports section, then the business section, and finally the front page. Cid gulps his coffee, squints at the small type until a headache forms behind his eyes.

"You should get glasses," Vincent says. Cid glances up, snorts.

"I'm not that old yet, and I'll be the judge of when I damn well need glasses!"

Thirty-four's not that old; even if he does look like an old man compared to Vincent, who's still as young and ice-pale as the day they met.

Vincent, who's sitting at the kitchen table with nothing at his back, with Death Penalty locked in the weapons chest in the living room.

Cid's coffee cup pauses on the way to his mouth. Vincent raises a brow, knowing everything that Cid wants to say but won't.

"It was time," Vincent offers with a shrug.

Cid lays his paper aside, sets his coffee down. The mug chips, the table shaking.

"That's it? Hell, after I got back from Wutai, it took me months to stop flinching every time something banged, or to stop snapping at everybody that tried to talk to me-" he knows he sounds a little hysterical, "-and I'm _still_ not all there, and you just wake up one morning and decide, 'Well, maybe it's time I stop sitting with my back to the wall and my gun in my lap,' and bam, that does it?!"

"Cid." Vincent sounds reproachful. "That's not 'it', and you know it."

Cid knows it all right: he knows how he spent nights trying to slide the Death Penalty out of Vincent's clenched hands, only to find himself pinned on the floor with a gun to his skull- and that never got any easier, he thinks dimly, even though the Turk's held a gun to his head a hundred times since that first, terrible night- he knows Vincent's snarling rage when Cid forced him to sit away from the wall; he knows the nightmares and the paranoia and the flashbacks brought on by the tiniest of things. He knows how Vincent's sat up at night, tormented by gunfire only he can hear; he's sat up with him and listened to the silence and understood that whatever guns Vincent's hearing, they only exist in a time and place he's never known.

"You say you're still not all there," Vincent continues, his eyes full of something like wisdom. "Neither am I. Just because I can sit at a table and know that no one is going to attack me doesn't mean that I'm sane, or that I've stopped hearing the guns at night. I never will."

Cid wonders what it says about Vincent's mental state- and his own- that even knowing that Vincent will be haunted for the rest of his life by ghost gunfire:

It's still progress.

Cid finishes slurping down his coffee and lights his first smoke of the day.

"Whatever," he says. Progress is progress, and he's damn well not going to second-guess it. "I'm just glad I won't have to keep yelling across the room to have a talk with you." He smiles crookedly. "Got plans?"

Vincent's eyes flicker- he curls in on himself- he catches his lower lip between his teeth-

Caen stares at Cid over the rim of his coffee cup. "Drawing."

Cid feels ill.

* * *

There is a room at the back of the house, wallpapered with drawings. Drawn in blue ink, women and men and children.

Cid knows some people would call them portraits.

He knows they're really death masks.

Most of them have faces twisted in terror, all the wrinkles and the terrified tears in their eyes replicated- fear because the last thing they saw was Hellmasker or Galian Beast or Chaos coming to rip them from life. He knows Caen spends the most time on those, giving the anonymous victims of Hojo's madness faces and voices, even if those faces and those voices are given by the man who unwillingly killed them.

Cid figures those people are probably grateful; they probably understand.

That's what he tells Vincent, at least, when he goes in the room for the first time and finds Vincent huddled in the center with sapphire ink smeared across his fingers from a broken pen. Vincent has been staring at the pictures- doesn't know who they are, why they all look so scared- but then, dawning on him like some bloody sun, he understands.

"These are the ones that didn't escape," he says in a voice as hollow as the grave.

"Yeah," Cid said as he joins him among the fluttering paper and stares at the dead. Vincent lets out a great, whispery sigh, his claws scratching against themselves. He looks so far away- as if he's gone to a place Cid can't ever follow.

Not that Cid wants to see that place.

The pictures start out in patches of blue-on-white, scattered around the walls, and slowly, like a disease, every time Cid goes inside there are more, spreading like a tumor. Young and old- a few with expressions of total serenity.

"Hey, Caen," he says one day, watching Caen outline the half-smiling mouth of a young woman, "why're some of them looking happy?"

The pen screeches to a halt. Caen stares at the paper in front of him, the enigmatic expression on a woman long dead. There is nothing else on the paper: just the mouth. For a moment Cid can believe that maybe that young woman was at a park, smiling at a beloved pet; at school, having just learned something new; at home, talking to her mother. But she wasn't doing any of those things when Caen burned her face into his mind to be drawn so many years later-

She was dying, and Cid knows it.

"Some of them," Caen says in his rusted voice of pain, "wanted to die. It was… better than what Hojo had planned."

Cid's never going to ask if Vincent wanted to die in Hojo's lab.

Why ask a question he knows the answer to?

The papers spread. Vincent stares at them with eyes full of sadness, and as the last gap begins to close, he begins to speak to them. He doesn't know their names; he doesn't know how they died. Only Caen knows that- but Caen's losing them, transferring them from memory to paper, so that Vincent can know as well.

It takes months before the last gap closes.

Cid's bent over his workbench in his toolshed, sweat rolling in sticky beads down his back, when he hears a loud crash and bang, a wail and a roar loud enough to shake the sky down-

And then nothing.

His heart is racing in his ear as he sprints across the lawn, yanks the back door open, takes the stairs two at a time. Because 'better' doesn't always last, and Vincent's never been one to be happy for long, and _oh God_ so much could happen!

The door to the drawing room is shut, and only silence seeps out from the cracks.

"Vince? I'm coming in." Cid turns the knob, his throat as dry as stone, and steps into whiteness.

He is standing in a room wallpapered in death. Children's eyes gaze in silent accusation- old men's noses are dark with tears- young women's smiles curve in strange forgiveness like the wings of birds.

Vincent is in the corner, knees drawn to his chest, and he is gazing upwards at the last drawing. A young woman-

Cid realizes with sickening certainty that she looks like Aeris.

He slides down the wall to end up sitting beside Vincent, staring at the hundreds of nameless ones who died in blood and pain and fear.

"I know them," Vincent says. His voice is wet and shredded with sorrow. He turns to Cid- Cid meets his eyes and sees an emptiness of spirit that he can't ever fix. "I know every single one of them-" a sound like a wet hiccup, all the more wrenching for the fact that Vincent _never_ hiccups, "-and I wish I didn't."

A thousand eyes gaze down on them.

Vincent points at random pictures and tells Cid- _their last words, their last expressions, what they were wearing as they died_- everything that Cid wishes he didn't need to know.

Caen's gone, enfolding himself back into the stripped wires and worn gears of Vincent's brain, leaving him with the memories of five hundred deaths, five hundred little pieces of Vincent's soul gone.

It's progress, the absorption of a shard.

It's progress.

But as Cid sits among the faces of the dead and listens to Vincent's voice spin a tale more gruesome than any of old-

He wishes it hadn't come at so high a cost.

* * *

The Turk was the first to be born and he is the last to go.

Cid pushes his goggles up his forehead and watches Vincent aim, his arm and gun moving as one as a gunshot cracks through the air like a whip. A leaf explodes into green dust on the distant tree, the hundreds of shreds spiraling down through the air.

Cid knows how the Turk slid back into his empty spot in Vincent's brain- he knows it didn't come from something so benign as a journal or drawings. He's followed the Turk into the woods, watched Death Penalty sing as it spits death into the hapless beasts.

The Turk kills them- hundreds of them- some with his claws, some with his gun, some by breaking their necks, a predator amongst the weakest of prey.

It makes Cid sick.

And the Turk just leaves those sad little red corpses there, each a reenactment of the assassinations that- and Cid finally understands just how bad those assassinations were- were so bloody and brutal and numbing that Vincent crushed the memories together so he wouldn't have to deal.

He's watched blood spill from a cut throat; he's turned away in disgust as the Turk drives his claws into a wolf's face and cleaves it in two by ripping upward; he's listened to the Turk describe in loving detail each clank and kick and gurgle of a body slipping towards the Lifestream.

It reminds him.

It reminds him of the war- and he flinches as blood flies in a red rainbow past his ear, splattering his cheek, and he closes his eyes against the flash of the gun-

_He watches the bomb he dropped land and roll end-over-end through the town square; it explodes in a rising sun of orange and black and red like skin sloughing off a man's legs; he banks, circles, watches blood leap on the walls, pumps his fist in time with the cheers of Morris, his radar op-_

_Morris who dies clawing at his shirt, his head a pulsing mad thing of bone and blood and lacerations, gurgling "Don't let me die- Don't-"_

Morris died, and Cid watched his body float out on the troop ship, bound for a home he wouldn't ever see.

He stands there as Vincent comes back to himself and stares at the poor bodies sprawled on the soaked earth, seeing humans. He watches as Vincent reaches out with a hand that doesn't shake- because it is not the eyelids of those dead that he's closing- and brushes his palm over the open yellow eyes, hiding the clouds of rot-blue.

He uses his materia to burn them on a pyre, standing by Vincent as they watch the smoke- black and thick and grainy like cremated bones- float up and away like a cloud of balloons, a black serpent straining for the sky.

"Do you regret it?" he asks. Vincent is gazing down at his claws that look like they've been dipped in red paint. His hair is knotted and snarled with blood. The gun hangs limply from his hand, an empty weapon, talisman of a woman long gone.

"I do."

The bones burn down to nothing.

"I do." Vincent's lips twist in a smile. "And for the rest of my life, I have to live with it."

Cid watches the Turk dissipate into smoke and the dust of a thousand bones in Vincent's eyes, leans in, tangles his fingers in Vincent's hair, kisses him.

He knows those bones and those deaths.

_Blood spurts from a torn aorta like oil from a hose  
A bullet crashes through teeth and palate and brain and bone into the air, trailing streamers of red like kite strings  
A knife splits a belly and pulls up_

He pulls back, keeps his arm around Vincent's waist.

Vincent breathes in-

Cid feels him shudder.

-and out.

Vincent folds in on himself, thuds to his knees in the gloom, and Cid follows him down, holds him as Vincent buries his head in the crook of Cid's neck. Tears burn in Cid's eyes.

The shards are gone.

He can taste it in the salt-sweat on Vincent's lips of tears that never fell.

* * *

**A/N: **Thanks for reading; comments and criticism are appreciated greatly.


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